NPR In The News: A Post-Election Special

Professional illustrator Wendy MacNaughton was stationed at NPR headquarters on election night, live sketching our reporting. See more of her work from the evening here: http://bit.ly/SovjOZ

Wendy MacNaughton

Originally published on November 7, 2012 4:20 pm

In the year and a half leading up to last night, NPR's Election and Washington teams worked nearly non-stop: producing live coverage, special series, profiles and reports of the politics taking shape across the country. And many others in the media stopped to take notice. So, with winners decided in the majority of elections, take a look back at a selection of coverage about NPR News "Election 2012":

Just last week, NPR Science Reporter Adam Cole visually scaled the electoral map to reflect the weight held by individual states and the money being invested in each. On election day, NBC's TODAY show used our graphic to demonstrate just what this looks like:

The TODAY show's "Top 5 memes of 2012 campaign"

Number three on the list was the viral video of 4-year-old Abbie Evans' reaction, filmed by her mom, to NPR campaign coverage.

Bipartisan Public Opinion Polls

NPR News commissioned three public opinion polls during the 2012 general election, with a hyper-focus on 12 key battleground states.

White House Correspondent Ari Shapiro visited MSNBC's The Daily Rundown to discuss what he found out in Cambridge about President Barack Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney's years at Harvard. The reports were part of NPR's election-long "Parallel Lives" series, which took a closer look at the surprising similarities between the two candidates.

"This is Ari Shapiro, traveling with the Romney Campaign."

For months on end, NPR White House correspondents traveled across America with the campaigns: Ari Shapiro with the Romney team and Scott Horsely with the President. In August, Ari's reporting from the road ended up setting the scene in GQ magazine's profile of the GOP hopeful:

Ari Shapiro is already recording a spot citing the quote for tomorrow morning's broadcast, which he records under his jacket in the seat behind me: "...he may have done some damage by drawing attention to his wealth once again."

We couldn't help but have some fun with Ari's GQ moment either. Adam Cole mocked up this caricature of our correspondent inspired by the descriptions of him in the article.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

And, why not? Rove's Crossroads political money empire had showered Republican candidates with close to $300 million this election cycle, a funding gusher courtesy of the 2010 Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and other recent court decisions.

A very good general election for Democrats got even better on Wednesday when they retained U.S. Senate seats in Montana and North Dakota, both of which had looked ripe for Republicans throughout much of the campaign.

Victories by Sen. Jon Tester of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, in contests so close that concessions from the losing Republican candidates didn't occur until Wednesday, helped Senate Democrats reach 54 seats in the next Congress. That was a net increase of one seat from their current majority.